We Jews: Who Are We and What Should We Do: Who We Are and What We Should Do [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

Rabbi Steinsaltz's magnificent and brilliant book "The Thirteen Petalled Rose" is on my list of the ten most meaningful books I have ever read. So it was with great pleasure that I looked forward to reading his newest book, "We Jews". This book is far from the spirituality of "The Thirteen Petalled Rose". It seeks to answer practical Jewish questions such as 'do Jews have their own set of character traits', 'are we a nation or a religion' and 'are Jews excessively cold or excessively emotional'. Many of the answers to these questions seem to be generalizations that are incapable of proof, such as his belief that Jews inherently share character traits such as flexibility and adaptability, stubborness and persistence, individualism, intellectualism etc. His chapter on the Jews monistic perception of the world drawn from their monotheism and how it affected the work of Marx, Freud and Einstein is indeed fascinating. In the end Rabbi Steinsaltz pessimistically concludes that given the way Jews are living (i.e. the large degree of assimilation) will lead to their end as a people. He implies that perhaps there could be a slim hope for Jewish continuity in the building of 'a second center, comparable to, possibly better then the main center in Israel'. He never tells us the location of that center, but I assume it to be in America. He tells us Jewish continuity will require a lot of work, but never mentions with any specificity what that work looks like, and in the end that is the difficulty with this book. It is short on the details. Each chapter ends with questions by Arthur Kurzweil with whom Rabbi Steinsaltz worked on this book, followed by the rabbi's answers. In these sections too answers are never fully explored. The Q & A could have been fascinating. Having studied with Arthur Kurzweil I know he is a brilliant man, and the inclusion of more of his questions and their answers could have been a wonderful way to flesh out this book. Unfortunately this was not done, which leaves this reader feeling terribly short changed.

Steinstalz is the greatest living Talmud scholar, an Israeli born into a secular family, and a mystic and Kabbalist.

The two things that stick with me most from this book - or perhaps I'll expand that to a few things:
-he makes the argument that from the supposed 5 million Jews of the beginning of the CE, there should be 300 million from natural increase. Therefore the surviving 15 million descendents have undergone a tremendous selection pressure, both physical and mental, including those with the inner character and abilities to allow them to choose Judaism and survive. He then tries to list these inherited Jewish character traits. I will try and list them all below, but the one that struck me most was Individualism.

He has a whole chapter on the Messiah complex that leads Jews to try and save the world, which I certainly recognize within myself.

And he has very harsh words about the attempt to survive and continue as Jews for its own sake, if it is empty of Judaism and the Jewish mission to be a holy nation. His description of the Biblical injunction to be a nation of priests and a holy nation is stronger than anything I have read on the subject. He truly believes the essence of Jewish character, expressed or not, is to be a servant of God, and if we don't want to do this, we might as well give up.

one other point he made that I found very convincing: jews are not a race, nation or religion but a family. From a family, you can be estranged, you can betray...but you are never anything but a son or daughter. Jews are the children of God and of the patriarchs and matriarchs. We can betray our inner essence as well, but our inherited heritage cannot be erased either.

Some things from the book:

His list of Jewish intrinsic traits:

All murders of Jews and all the difficulties of being Jewish resulted in a constant winnowing out of people who remained Jewish. Those who remained Jewish and passed it on to their children had to possess character traits, "a combination of qualities that allows them to withstand such difficulties, and also to transmit the message to their children."

1. high survival capacity: adaptability, flexibility, will to live, belief in life, talent for imitation and simulation/to create a false self/to believe in one's false self, to be a wanderer/an alien/a cosmopolitan
a. negative expression: pushiness, materialism, loss of values in materialism. Flexibility and adaptability can result in spinelessness, loss of self-respect, pandering, aping with no self-esteem.

2. stubbornness. Persistence. Can be directed towards remaining Jewish, or towards other pursuits - business, science etc.

3. individualism. Main spiritual and religious duties of a jew are as an individual. No priest or imam does religion for you. "most of his duties are between himself and God alone."

a. Also, no organizations in civil life required Jew limit his individualism. No guilds, army, church, state jobs, corporation jobs...the opposite, each Jew had to make his economic survival alone, on private initiative (why didn't Jews organize themselves economically?politically?)
b. Negative side: weak in teamwork, cooperation, even when Jewish survival at stake. Can result in selfish egotism.

4. buoyed by faith. Deep need for faith. "It is not possible to follow God as a Jew should do...except on the basis of a deep core of faith." "Whoever does not have faith -the ability to construct his life on the basis of concerns other than real and immediate materialistic considerations - is incapable of continuing to live as a Jew. Such ability and compulsion to believe are, perhaps, what has most distinguished essential Jewishness since its formation. The very first choice of Israel was the choice of belief and this choice strengthen over the generations, because it is impossible to be a Jew without it." (elsewhere, he argues being a Jew is to be born into the Jewish family, is impossible to stop being!)
a. Messiah complex universal jewish psychological `complex'. The need to `redeem reality, to reform it, to improve it. No one can continue a life of distress and insecurity, in which he is sometimes despised and humiliated by others, unless he feels a deep sense of mission....the individual Jew may lose his messianic faith, but he is incapable of losing his need to hasten the redemption."
b. Connected to the search for redemption is Intellectualism
c. Readiness to join cults and messianic movements such as Communism

"...a Jew may distance himself from his cultural heritage and even leave it entirely...but a person cannot escape his essential self....A person can observe anything in world, either close or distant, but every subject he observes or deals with...he can only see with Jewish eyes, and he can only think about it with the mind of a Jew." P158

Rabbi Judah Halevi, Book of the Kuzari: "Israel exists among the nations like a heart among the limbs."

"Imagine that someone has a document that can open the Gates of Heaven. He takes this document and runs with it to the ends of the earth. When he finds he is unable to reach Heaven in his lifetime, he gives the document to his children. And his children go on running with it and keeping it safe, generation after generation.

But with time the words...are rubbed away. The people who carry the document are no longer able to read it....Later still it is reduced to a mere piece of paper, and even this piece of paper starts to rot.

...Eventually, however, the people ...will discover they are running very hard and very fast but carrying nothing. And so they will stop running." P184-5

Jews have lost our meaning, our mission, our message. We are an empty shell, not even an intact shell. Loss of `inner sense'. "People cannot go on living in the past, even if the past was pleasant - and ours was not." We must have a living jewish culture that will create a heritage for generations - not `indulgence money. People paid to get rid of the guilt that came from discarding their Jewishness." Survival with hope requires an investment of life.

This book is a collection of a dozen essays, each of which can easily be read without reference to the others. The essays fall into three categories:

1. Some essays were, I think, very well thought out. I was especially impressed by his essay on Jews as a family, in which he points out that Jews are far too racially diverse to be a "race" in the conventional sense of the term, are too geographically scattered to be a conventional nation, and too ideologically diverse to be a conventional religion. Jewish ties are blood ties: one cannot easily leave the Jewish "family", and Jews say awful things to each other but can unite in response to threats. His essay on money explains why Jews were perceived to have money in Christian Europe; because Jews were often not allowed to be farmers, they were pushed into finance and thus handled money more than a farmer would.

2. Some essays were just preaching to the converted: reassertions of religious dogma that believers will agree with and skeptics will ignore (such as his essay asserting that Jews must be "priests to the world.")

3. Others didn't fit into either category but just weren't that persuasive: for example, he complains that Jews should somehow be more unified- but today, the most unified religion (Catholicism) appears to be stagnating in much of the world, while a bitterly divided Islam has the flexibility to mutate and to adapt to local conditions. If Judaism had a pope, would there really be more Jews? I doubt it. His essay on Jewish character traits is flatly self-contradictory: he asserts that Jews survive due to "flexibility" yet two pages later writes that Jews are "a stiff-necked people."

His pessimism in the last essay seems to contradict traditional Jewish theology: the tradition holds that a Messiah will set the world aright at the end of days, yet Steinsaltz despairs of Jewish survival.